by Shannon Chance TU Berlin and SEFI’s special interest groups for Ethics and Sustainability teamed…
This year, the SEFI Francesco Maffioli Award of Excellence for Developing Learning and Teaching in Engineering Education was awarded to Dr Joost Vennekens from KU Leuven, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering Technology in recognition of an extraordinary societal impact of this project.
Dr Vennekens’ work includes Service Learning as a pedagogical means of improving the creativity and empathy of students in the Bachelor in Engineering Technology: Electronics-ICT programme. He started this work a few years before the pandemic and kept it up through the times when we were all working online/remotely. As a result of his excellent work, the leading European conference on Computer Science Education published it and presented it at the European Conference on Service Learning in Higher Education. The project was also featured as an example in an EU report on Service Learning and on a number of Service Learning platforms across Europe.
Other Nominated projects:
TU DELFT Netherlands – COMET team for their work on the ethics education project, which successfully developed and implemented an interactive engineering ethics exercise that has students tinkering and transforming familiar physical artifacts so to promote critical reflection on ethical concerns regarding ableism and inclusivity.
TAMPERE UNIVERSITY Finland – Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Computing Sciences, for their work on leading Team Robostudio to many successes over the past few years. Robostudio is a multidisciplinary co-learning space to work with social robots at Tampere University. It is dedicated to educational purposes, and the activity is strongly connected to the research.
UNIVERSITY POLITECNICA de VALENCIA Spain – for their work on transforming a senior Airport Engineering course into a flipped learning and project-based learning experience for students over the past several years. It is considered to be a pioneer course in the department and the faculty over the past eight years.